Unless the analysis in http://www.sportsscientists.com/2011/12/science-of-sport-awa... is quite wrong, I can't see how he should be allowed to compete. The story here is being cast as a win against bureaucracy, but ignores the fact that he has significant mechanical and metabolic advantages against able-bodied athletes.
Final paragraphs:
> The end result of this is that Pistorius was "cleared", based not on science, but on a legal process that was manipulated by science and the huge drive to permit Pistorius to run. And make no mistake, there is inspiration in the story.
> In fact, it got to the point where despite the science, I can appreciate the viewpoint of those who say "Sure, there is an advantage, but there's only one such athlete, and he's not running away with the gold medals, and so the good outweighs the bad, so let him compete despite that advantage".
> I disagree with that, but I can respect the opinion of those who believe it. What cannot be accepted, however, is the assertion that there is no advantage. Everything about the science points to the advantage, from the pacing strategy he uses, to the German-testing that found mechanical and metabolic differences, to the Texas testing which provided evidence of an athletic advantage.
> The science was clear, from the point of hypothesis, to the theory behind it, to the evidence. The deceit in the case, fueled by a willfully ignorant media who would rather portray as villains anyone who dares suggest what the science really says, is equally clear, to me at least.
What is the decision procedure for whether an advantage is unfair? Athletic competition is always about physical inequalities among humans. Does your decision procedure resort to the idea that certain things are "natural?" If so, that's a feeble notion, since prosthetics are no more or less "natural" than, say, rigorous training and diets or metal plates to fix a broken bone.
Several comments in this thread relate to Pistorius' prosthetics and whether they give him an unfair advantage.
The Court of Arbitration for Sport have ruled that there is no evidence that his prosthetics constitute an unfair advantage over his preferred 400m distance. The initial IAAF testing showed that he used less energy at full speed, but this is not relevant to sprinting performance, which demands maximum power output. All below-knee amputees are at a significant disadvantage during the start and initial acceleration of the race, which is vital in sprinting.
Personally, I think the most obvious evidence that these prosthetics do not constitute an advantage is the times of other athletes using identical limbs. Pistorius is whole seconds faster than his nearest rivals. If the limbs constitute a meaningful advantage, then why is Pistorius so uniquely quick?
> I think the most obvious evidence that these prosthetics do not constitute an advantage is the times of other athletes using identical limbs. Pistorius is whole seconds faster than his nearest rivals. If the limbs constitute a meaningful advantage, then why is Pistorius so uniquely quick?
You're mixing apples and oranges here.
In the highest most competitive horse races, it's not uncommon to still see horses that win by large margins. Having a horse win without advantage against other horses is not a good reason to start having humans race against horses.
The size of the population from which the top race horses are drawn is orders of magnitude smaller than the size of the set of human track athletes. Thus in the Olympics, you're looking at specimens a few standard deviations above the mean, instead of only 1 or 2 in horse races, which means the very top ones are going to be significantly better than the rest of the competition.
Very true, but that actually validates my point- how many amputees actively strive to participate in the paralympics? I would estimate that pool is smaller than all the horses being raced, meaning his accomplishment of beating other racers is even less significant.
While his current prosthetic might not give him a great competitive advantage, doesn't it seem like a slippery slope? 12 years from now, lets say there is a breakthrough in prosthetic technology, one that gets rid of all the disadvantages, and improves the advantages -- do we let those in, or do we say "No, you can only use prosthetics from x years ago?"
Didn't they ban the swim suits from the last olympics because of the advantages they conferred? I think they can evaluate the advances in technologies on a case by case basis and decide. His current setup offers no apparent one for his race, thus he should be allowed to compete.
I think it would be much harder to determine whether a prosthetic was "fair" though. With the swimsuits, you could test two different swimsuits on the same swimmer and see if one offered a direct advantage. Not to mention, when people that have not broken world records before start breaking world records, all of them using the same suit, it becomes pretty obvious.
With prosthetics, however, how do you compare how they run with prosthetics to how they might have ran if they had legs? If they don't break world records, but they place 2nd when they might have placed 5th with legs, how will we be able to know that?
I imagine they can use the same process from the wiki article where they studied the mechanical efficiency of Pistorius's running form and compared to other runners. They'd need to broaden the study to include turns and starts, and possibly more. That should show whether prosthetic runners have a net advantage.
Exactly. Same goes with banned substances. Caffeine, for instance, is not banned despite giving a very minor advantage (or so the nutritionist told us when I used to speed skate competitively). A group of people educated on the subject decide where to draw the line.
Dozens of sports have been dealing with similar issues for many years, with no significant difficulties.
Golf is perhaps the most obvious example - the Royal and Ancient rulebook includes restrictions on everything from clubhead size to coefficients of restitution to groove angles, in order to ensure that traditional courses remain relevant. They have taken a sport far more complex than running and established a very effective set of rules to freeze the development of equipment used by professionals. Twenty years ago there was the fear that longer and longer drives were going to render old courses obsolete, but that concern is all but gone - the rulebook sets hard limits on the basic mechanical properties of equipment.
If disabled athletes start outrunning able-bodied athletes, the solution is very simple - the IAAF simply adds a paragraph to Rule 143 of the Competition Rules, which currently specifies the regulations for shoes and clothing. A coefficient of restitution rule, like that used in most ball games, would be easy to assess and put a hard limit on the efficiency of prostheses. If the International Paralympic Committee decides not to make such restrictions, that's their business and would have no effect on able-bodied sport.
The thing about golf clubs is that everyone has a manufactured golf club -- it's not like some people have one they were born with and some have to go buy them.
If the IAAF sets a limit on prosthetics, they cannot get it exactly "right" -- the limit will be either below or above the capabilities of the best sprinter's legs.
If it's slightly below, that means that a disabled sprinter can never win, and shouldn't be competing in a race that's stacked against him. If the limit is higher, that means that disabled sprinters are at an advantage, and that able-bodied sprinters may even be able to gain an advantage by replacing their legs with prostheses.
This isn't really a slippery slope. It has been dealt with in other sports repeatedly over the years. Competitive (sport) javelins have been re-engineered several times to make them harder to throw after a few of them ended up injuring spectators in the stadium! Heck even golf clubs have maximum performance limitations. There's some trial-and-error involved but sports generally converge on limitations they consider fair.
No? In golf, there was recently a debate as to whether a (permanently) injured player should be allowed to use a golf cart when all the other players had to walk. There are already restrictions on binoculars, wind gauges, and other measuring tools and techniques. In racing, tracks have been limited in their efficiency. Clothing is restricted. Professional and Olympic racers have labs design shoes for them. In the context of limiting "enhancements", I don't see anything about prosthetics that would make them more of a slippery slope than what we've already dealt with.
How about voluntary child amputees because that's the only way left to compete in the Olympics? Doesn't that little slippery slope make traditional doping scandals seem like pat-a-cake?
It's not a slippery slope. The sport will put reasonable restrictions on runners' equipment that won't significantly incentivize replacing natural limbs.
Edit: who knows, you may be right. After all, gymnasts injure themselves daily and risk their lives on a minute-by-minute basis during practices and competition. I doubt they would limit self-mutilation per se.
As prosthetic limbs can be and are switched out for specialized versions adapted to different scenarios, 'race limbs' are just another kind of sporting equipment.
Except not all competitors have equal access to them, which is a huge difference. Other sporting equipment is much less affected by this problem, and disciplines eventually converge to an equilibrium point where all serious athletes are using roughly equivalent tech.
I think the idea is that they can be made to use more or less the same equipment as time goes on otherwise they'll not be allowed to compete. This is sports, not a free market.
I've seen guys like him when I run half-marathons. Damn, they're fast. It really challenges the notion of disabled; they're effectively actually superhuman. The less energy at cruising speed is obviously a bigger advantage over longer distances.
Running a 400m is much more about anaerobic endurance than it is about raw speed, even at the olympic level.
40-100m are speed, 400-800m are anaerobic, then the mile and up are aerobic endurance. There's some gray in there but go run a 400 if you don't believe me that the race is dominated by endurance.
How convenient for Oscar then that his both calf muscles are made out of carbon and don't fatigue. On top of that his low leg is significantly lighter than non-amputees, though whether this is a curse or a blessing is arguable.
Oscars main 'advantage' over fellow amputees that he grew up wearing prosthetics and had the funds to get ones that are good enough to train on. I can't imagine a Jamaican bilateral amputee being in the same situation.
The problem is that at the moment he's a one of a kind, which makes comparisons pretty much useless. Regardless of it all, his achievements are impressive and he's an example for a lot amputees.
Although I admire the guy, it doesn't make much sense to include him in the Olympics. If he were actually good enough to compete for medals, then everything would boil down to the results of the studies gauging the size of his advantage/disadvantage (as linked by stupandaus below).
Track runners compete on tenths or even hundredths of a second, and it's silly to think you could have a reasonable, objective decision on the type of equipment he was allowed to use based off of the nebulous concept of an "advantage".
Although less obvious, there are other areas in sport where these issues currently exist.
One of the more recent controversies resulted in the ban of LZR Racer (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LZR_Racer#FINA_rule_changes), a swimsuit which resulted in an abnormally high number of world records during the years it was available.
Whats to say that track shoes can't have similar performance aiding effects? It may be time for sporting officials to limit the equipment athletes can use. NASCAR does this successfully -- they have stringent specifications regarding the cars/parts that can be used to keep the races competitive.
And steroid after steroid has gone through similar processes; there is a reason there are still world records from the 80s East Germany and the Soviet Union. In less obvious advantages we have dietary supplements, training at altitude or in altitude chambers, biomechanical analysis and direct muscle stimulation. Every athletic competition is a balance between what technology gets through and which doesn't. Most olympic athletes are already genetic outliers; I'm sure sooner or later gene therapy will become a major issue.
The idea that athletics is purely a competition of body is a convenient fiction, nothing more. It seems a shame to me to exclude people simply because they challenge that fiction.
But this is just absurd, everyone has access to them, why not to allow everyone to use the suites and advance the sport clothing? Same thing happened with skates (of all things): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clap_skate and everyone just switched to the new design and continued racing.
I'm surprised that everywhere I read, people are more interested in wondering how much of an advantage his condition gives him, than considering that perhaps it is a great disadvantage.
People are claiming things like, "oh, his heart has to pump less blood a shorter distance." What about the fact that he has way less muscle, no toes, feet, or ankles (which are all critical for balance and for sensing distances and terrain), and that his body is being stressed in ways not intended. These are huge, obvious disadvantages, and I don't see why they're seemingly ignored.
Sure, the prosthetics can vary in mechanical advantage, but you could just regulate those like any other sports equipment. But to say that not having legs could even possibly be unfair for running is ridiculous and a bit offensive.
I think part of the skepticism is that it's far more likely that these carbon fiber legs are advantageous making a naturally fast runner become world caliber as opposed to the fastest man in the world having a great disadvantage causing him to only become world caliber.
There are scientists on both sides of the issue as well, so all we have is opinions. I'm no expert but my guess is that if Usain Bolt had been wearing these and training his whole life he would not only hold the world record, he would have destroyed it and would not count.
Edit: BUT, there's no question in my mind that they are not "equal" to a human legs. There are clear advantages and disadvantages of them. I refuse to believe that the designers who were trying to make them as fast as possible just happened to create legs that were 100% equivalent to human legs. It's IMO not fair for Oscar or other Olympians but it's not his fault he has no one else to compete against.
I'm personally not in support of this decision regardless of whether or not the prosthetics provide Oscar an advantage.
I think a sport such as a running race is a test in how fast the very best people in the world can push the limits of the human body. Removing limbs and replacing them with prosthetics while impressive does not fit that standard.
It doesn't particularly matter. History will remember the asterisk whether the Olympic committee puts one down or not.
Perhaps the biggest question of fairness is that a person (or two) that dedicates much of their life to training for athletic contests will not receive the medal that they would have received had he been prevented from competing.
Whatever anyone thinks, I feel bad for this guy. Advantage or not, he's a hell of an athlete, yet he can never accomplish anything without people questioning it.
If he wins, people will be split over feeling happy for him and thinking he only won because of his prosthetics. If he loses, the media will spin it as a triumph of meat over machine.
I think some of the comments are missing an understanding of sprinting, so I will attempt to clarify:
There are four "pure" sprinting events, 60m (indoor only), 100m (outdoor only), 200m, 400m.
On TV, you just see a person effortlessly "sprinting." However, the sprints are actually very technical events. What you don't see is that each race is comprised of four phases: beginning with an explosive start out of the blocks, a drive phase, a transition phase, and finally a sprint phase.
The drive phase - which some commenters have concluded as Pistorius' weakness - is where the athlete builds speed. It is characterized by a forward lean in the athlete and powerful, "pulling" strides. At the elite level, an athlete will remain in this phase for 30m-40m, depending on the length of the race and the height of the athlete.
As the athlete builds speed, it becomes much harder to stay in this forward-leaning position - their legs simply cannot keep up with their body. Thus, they begin to transition into a different style of running. This is called the transition phase - where the sprinter's body moves to from this leaning drive phase into the tall and upright sprinting phase. This can be anywhere from 10-30m.
The drive and transition are important. Some time during these two phases, the athlete will reach their maximum instantaneous speed. At no point after reaching maximum speed will the athlete ever reach that speed again. Thus, the race becomes "who can slow down the least."
The upright sprinting phase is where the athlete tries to maintain the speed they built up during the drive phase until the end of the race. An athlete will be upright, with the slightest of forward leans. Their legs are firing straight up and down very quickly, trying to minimize the time spent on the ground. The ability to do this correctly very much depends on an athlete's "sprint endurance" - which is a completely different kind of endurance than, say, running a mile.
So, on average, 90% of a 60m race is spent gaining speed, 50% of 100m race, 25% of a 200m race, and 12% of a 400m race. The race a sprinter chooses to run depends on whether they are powerful and explosive (shorter races) or how little speed they can lose while upright (longer races).
Here are two fun facts now that you know this information:
1. Marion Jones (who is a cheater) did not have the fastest top end speed out of her contemporaries. She did, however, have the best ability to maintain speed. She was a 100m Olympic Gold Medalist.
2. The Olympic-level weight lifters will outperform Olympic-level sprinters in the first 30m of a race.
There are some nuances to what what I've said that I won't bore you with (for example, some 200m runners can perform a mini-drive on the curve to grab a bit more speed for the straight), but the basic idea is that your sprint endurance is crucial in EVERY sprint race except the 60m. You can make your own conclusions about whether or not Pistorius is legit, but having run the 400m at a high level for a number of years, I can tell you that not being able to feel your calves or feet or have to use the energy required to make them move would have been something I'd be interested in.
Are there training advantages in immunity to injury below the lower knee? How much training is generally constrained by the resilience of the foot and ankle?
Injuries are a part I hadn't thought about. Common injuries in that part of the body are: shin splints, achilles issues, plantar fasciitis, calf pull, compartment syndrome, and stress fractures.
I know of at least two athletes for each injury who have either missed training time, an entire season or a career. Injuries are incredibly common in track and field: and make no mistake, there is no emotional-movie-style strength that allows an athlete to overcome their injury due to sheer force of will. Track and field is an 100% sport: if you aren't at 100%, you aren't going to win. A lot of the sport is managing and preventing injury, especially at the elite level.
While I would reason that "upper leg" injuries like hamstring, glute, hip and quad pulls are more damning and common than "lower leg" injuries (especially among men), and that upper body injuries like arms and abdomen are nearly unheard of, being able to write off an entire class of injuries is a huge bonus.
I also didn't mention strength over time benefits: the ability to have a consistent power output of a critical part of your stride (the toe push) that is unaffected by fatigue is very helpful.
There were studies done that showed that he gains some advantages from springs in long, straight sections, but also has disadvantages in starting and turning.
In some sense, all athletes use prosthetics. Humans aren't born with spikes, and definitely not with asymmetrical ones optimized for making left turns (especially important in the 200m, where one accelerates throughout the curve of the track)
Amputees can take this to a new level. They can optimize the length of their legs on the distance to run and their fitness. For now, we see that as something that enables people, but I think this guy would not have been allowed to take part in a 'regular' event if he had a real chance to win (the wheelchair marathon is a separate event from the regular marathon for the same reason)
In regards to already accepted 'prosthetics' such as spikes and suits in swimming, perhaps it should go back to the way the olympics started? I'm not being facetious, but it is going to start cropping up more and more. They don't have to be completely naked, but just covered up so that nothing a person wears affects their performance.
The whole notion of preventing unfair technical advantages in the Olympics is outdated and stems from the fundamental attribution error [1]. The competition is no longer primarily about the athlete but about the level of training they have access to and the size of a country's pool of healthy candidates to select from. Industrialized nations win the majority of medals [2] since they have a large healthy population to select from and they can afford to train those athletes and provide high quality equipment. Discriminating against Pistorius would be as bad as discriminating against an Olympian because they were rich enough to afford expensive coaches and equipment or banning Michael Phelps because he won the genetic lottery which gave him his body structure.
It makes sense to ban certain performance enhancing methods such as illegal steroids because they have severely negative side effects, but the Olympics would be more fun if the rules were much looser. Let all the athletes have the best training and equipment their sponsors can afford. There is little difference between technology that reduces disadvantages such as lighter bikes or shoes and technology that enhances advantages like low drag swimsuits or cybernetic legs. Unless we want to genetically screen all our athletes to make sure they were not born with any advantage and force them to use the same training program and equipment, we should stop trying to compensates for advantages and disadvantages and just do whatever results in the best entertainment.
>The competition is no longer primarily about the athlete but about the level of training they have access to and the size of a country's pool of healthy candidates to select from.
Sure, if the unit under consideration is the country that gains the most medals. But at the individual level, it is still very much about the athlete and what the human body can accomplish.
This is the sort of thing Deus Ex touches on. I think we should allow people with prosthetics to perform in the olympics, but they should be judged against other people with the same or similar prostheses. There's no reason we can't accept the accomplishments of humans who have modified or artificial body parts, but they should not be compared to the 'natural' human body. I imagine if they had a separate set of events for cyborgs or humans with modified bodies, people would enjoy those events as celebrations of technology.
In a way, all competitors in the olympics use prosthetics. The shoes that runners use modify the function and behavior of the foot, the suits (banned or unbanned) that swimmers wear modify the drag on the body, and even sports like archery use the highest quality technologies for bows and arrows to provide the highest competitive advantage. These body part replacements aren't much different, and one day the prosthetics will be better than our natural body parts (in some ways they already are).
For everyone claiming Oscar has a technology advantage, an expert committee led by Hugh Herr (world leader in bio-mechatronics)[1,2] across scientists from 6 universities, proved in 2008 that Oscar did NOT have any advantage. This has been mostly a political battle.
In every race someone has an advantage, otherwise every finish would be a tie. The question is whether his mechanical advantage in one section is balanced by his disadvantages in others, and whether this is fair to other runners.
Frankly, I have no dog in that fight; since I am not likely to be running that race, nor am I on the Olympic Committee. I just find it interesting for people's understanding athletics and fairness in general.
One should be able to develop rigid boots that couple to composite springs for non amputees to run in a similar fashion. This would involve an effective lengthening of the limbs. Maybe this is not an idea but a memory...
Search on YouTube for "Spring Shoes": They're called "Skyrunners."
I wonder if short people equipped with these would be competitive with bicycle messengers? Apparently they confer a significant efficiency advantage. I also wonder if robots could use these to move. I think that would be okay, so long as the robots could also stand still and dynamically balance without bouncing, otherwise they'd be annoying.
Prosthetics that improve performance should be banned from the Olympics. If prosthetics become good enough that completely-natural athletes can't win medals, then athletes who haven't lost limbs (and aren't willing to have an "accident") will effectively be excluded from the sport.
Of course, this doesn't apply to prosthetics that don't actually improve performance or are completely irrelevant to the sport in question. It doesn't matter if a soccer player has a prosthetic arm as long as it weighs as much as his other one.
Prosthetics are fundamentally different from other sports equipment in that any athlete can use a given piece of equipment, but most athletes can't use prosthetics at all.
Ridiculous. There should be absolutely no technology or mechanical aids allowed in Olympic events like running. There is no way to determine how Pistorius would run if he had legs, so any attempt at analyzing the impact of the prosthetic is untestable.
Suppose a person who suffers from Short stature(http://www.diseasesdatabase.com/ddb18756.htm) wanted to compete in Olympic sprinting. Would it be acceptable for him to wear stilts that make him 5'10", since he suffers from a medical condition which prevents him from entering the race otherwise?
I love this story. I believe the government actually loosened its requirements just a bit to allow him to compete. I think it was a terrific idea. [I'm kind of rooting for him more than I'm rooting for my home country! -- shhh, don't tell anyone]
What a sweet story leg less dude gets to compete w legged dudes, but his legs were made for robocop....
Im not going to dispute his athleticism, but in a place like the Olympics where it always comes down to hundredth of a second to beat some decade old record... Where all these ppl trained since they were born... It just doesn't seem right... If at least the prosthetics were engineered to behave like human legs it wouldn't be as bad, but they are obviously designed for a specific goal. I don't think he uses the same legs to go grocery shopping or catch a movie...
Ps: this is an undeducated comment, I'm not planning to read dozens of articles to study the scientific aspects of Joe's toes...
I'm really saddened by the cynical tone of the many critics of Oscar out there. People only seem to focus on the advantages his prosthetics, whilst ignoring what must be a multitude of disadvantages. He has less leg power to power out of the blocks and he probably looses energy through the connection of his legs to the prosthetics. And lets not forget mental disadvantages.
Oscar is probably a one in a generation case, it would be travesty to ban him from competing.
Final paragraphs:
> The end result of this is that Pistorius was "cleared", based not on science, but on a legal process that was manipulated by science and the huge drive to permit Pistorius to run. And make no mistake, there is inspiration in the story.
> In fact, it got to the point where despite the science, I can appreciate the viewpoint of those who say "Sure, there is an advantage, but there's only one such athlete, and he's not running away with the gold medals, and so the good outweighs the bad, so let him compete despite that advantage".
> I disagree with that, but I can respect the opinion of those who believe it. What cannot be accepted, however, is the assertion that there is no advantage. Everything about the science points to the advantage, from the pacing strategy he uses, to the German-testing that found mechanical and metabolic differences, to the Texas testing which provided evidence of an athletic advantage.
> The science was clear, from the point of hypothesis, to the theory behind it, to the evidence. The deceit in the case, fueled by a willfully ignorant media who would rather portray as villains anyone who dares suggest what the science really says, is equally clear, to me at least.